Baroness Bull: My Lords, it is a great honour to speak here for the first time and follow such a passionate and cogent case for the creative industries from the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg. The welcome I have received from all parts of the House could not have been kinder. The support from Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and all their staff has been invaluable. At every turn, I have had cause to thank the omniscient and omnipresent doorkeepers and I have already benefited from the excellence service of the Library staff. I am indebted to my supporters, my noble friends Lady D’Souza and Lord Hall of Birkenhead, and my noble friend Lord Clancarty for acting as my mentor and meeting all my questions with patience and sound advice. I also pay tribute to the late Baroness Jowell, who did me the great honour of supporting my nomination to join this House.
My route here has been somewhat unconventional. For 20 years, I was a dancer with the Royal Ballet. I progressed, via a career in the media, to the Royal Opera House, where I became creative director. I then went to King’s College London, where I served as vice-principal for London. I now have the great privilege of joining your Lordships’ House. Mine may well be an unusual career trajectory but this life of careers,  in contrast to a career for life, could well prove the norm for young people in future. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Aberdare for securing the debate and allowing me to make my debut on this stage on a subject that is so close to my heart.
As we have heard, good careers guidance is about so much more than helping young people to get a job. It is about an individual’s well-being and fulfilment. It is about meeting the needs of future employers and ensuring the success of the economy. It is about reducing the costs on society of people not in employment or training. Crucially, it is about equality and fairness: we are all created equal but we are born into a world that is not.
Our ideas about what we might do in our adult lives are shaped by our experiences and by the examples around us. If you are brought up in a community where the majority of employment, where it exists, is in low-skilled sectors, your expectations are likely to be shaped accordingly. How else can we explain the fact that in 2017 only 4% of doctors, 6% of barristers and 11% of journalists came from working-class backgrounds? We know that just 24% of pupils eligible for free school meals go on to higher education, compared to 42% of their peers from better-off families. Over a quarter of this gap in participation relates to students with the same levels of attainment at GCSE, so this is not a question of academic ability but of the choices that these pupils perceive as being available to “people like us”.
For this reason, good careers advice is of disproportionate value to pupils from disadvantaged families. It does not just open doors—by exposing young people to a variety of previously unimagined professions, to self-employment or entrepreneurship as a viable career, it reveals that those doors exist. It connects students with individuals who have themselves broken the mould—people whose lived examples help to raise aspirations, tackle stereotypes and challenge choices that may be based on gender, ethnicity or class. This is why I take part in Robert Peston’s excellent Speakers for Schools initiative, which puts inspirational speakers into state schools. It was set up in 2011 when he noticed that all the invitations he received to speak came from independent schools.
In addition to this important role in enabling social mobility, good careers guidance is vital to help young people navigate the changing employment market, and to ensure that the skills they gain during education match the needs of the jobs that they will go on to fulfil. Now, more than ever, it is very difficult to predict what the future of work will be. According to the World Economic Forum, 65% of pupils entering primary school this week will find themselves working in a job that does not yet exist. One of the key skills they will need in order to thrive in this uncertain future is creativity—the capacity to imagine and then to invent the roles that they themselves will fulfil. Too often, creativity is seen as the preserve of artists—of people like me—but it is as important to the scientist or the engineer as it is to the musician and the dancer. The world’s most pressing challenges will never be addressed by technology alone, but when creativity is employed to imagine how machines can best serve human needs,  the results can change the world. It is notable, and no coincidence, that many of our leading tech entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley CEOs are graduates, not of science and maths but of arts and humanities. All the evidence shows that arts-based learning is key to developing the creativity that drives innovation.
Much airtime has been given to STEM subjects in discussions about looming automation, but with machines set to take on the more routine elements of work, human skills such as creativity will be at a premium. The global innovation foundation, NESTA, has concluded that creative occupations—not just artists, but roles that depend on a high degree of originality and the production of new artefacts and ideas—will be much more resistant to automation than other jobs. And they are likely to grow: workforce projections used in the industrial strategy suggest that creative jobs will grow at double the rate of the UK economy as a whole over the next six years.
I know that it is not the business of a maiden speaker to court controversy but, given everything we know about the future of work, can it really be controversial to challenge the prioritisation of STEM subjects in the otherwise laudable Gatsby benchmarks that the Government’s 2017 careers strategy adopts? The statutory guidance issued in January encourages schools to arrange meetings with a range of professionals that,
“should emphasise the opportunities created for young people who choose maths or science subjects”.
Why only these, when we know that creativity will be such a vital skill, and that creative occupations will be the most futureproof to computerisation?
Mine was an education in which careers advice had no part, focused as it was, from the age of 11, on a singular destination. I was among the 1% who the noble Lord, Lord Storey, alluded to: I dreamt of becoming a ballerina and I became one. I come from a family with no history of participation in higher education but I had the benefit of powerful role models in my parents, to whom I am eternally grateful: a mother who was determined that her four daughters would imagine a world beyond our own backyard, and a father with the courage to enter further education at the age of 30, moving a young family from Derby to Kent to take up his hard-won place at Rochester Theological College. I also had the inestimable benefit of an education in which arts and culture were never considered as secondary or an inferior choice.
I promise not to fulfil a role in your Lordships’ House as some kind of cultural “Thought for the Day”, inserting arts or creativity into every possible debate. But if I look back over the journey that has brought me here today, it is clear that what has sustained me in a career beyond the arts are the skills I learned through an education in which arts were integral: collaboration, communication, originality, resilience and creativity. These are exactly the skills that the Federation of Small Businesses is calling for in future employees and they are the kind of skills that NESTA predicts will be most in demand in 2030.
Given all this, we surely need to recognise that any advice that fails to position on equal terms careers in both STEM and creative occupations can never be considered either high quality or fit for the future.
I am honoured to have had the chance to contribute to this debate and I look forward to working as a part of this House on this and many other issues.

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone: My Lords, great appreciation is due to my noble friend Lord Howell for his dedication and expertise. In another place, he served as an enlightened chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He continues to add tremendous insight, eloquence and authority as chair of the International Relations Select Committee in this House. We are all in his debt.
I fear I may have tested your Lordships’ patience today, but I need to declare my personal interest in that my grandfather, Maxwell Garnett, was Secretary of the League of Nations Union from 1920 until 1938. It was his life’s work and we were all brought up on the work of the League of Nations Union. He worked extremely closely with the father of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. We used to hear a great deal about “Judd”; we had no idea who he was, but he was a subject of conversation throughout our childhood.
In these troubling and difficult times, I wanted to make a contribution. We see a world assailed almost daily by terrorist attacks—thousands killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced by sustained conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. We see insidious nationalism and xenophobia rising up across Europe and elsewhere. Fear and anger manifest themselves in a pervasive backlash against human rights. Our technological triumphs come twinned with malicious and disturbingly opaque aggression, from cybercrime to election-hacking. Liberal democracy is being undermined by persistent backsliding. The Freedom House research institute considers the world to be in its 12th consecutive year of democratic decline. The dangers of climate change carry unprecedented urgency.
The words of Dag Hammarskjöld echo in our ears: “The UN was not created to send mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell”. Let us consider the UN Human Rights Council, for example, which rightly attracts controversy over the anti-Israel bias of permanent agenda item 7. The inclusion of countries such as Russia, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia can be questioned. Their records on political inclusion and civil liberties leave a great deal to be desired but, nevertheless, many regret seeing the United States turn its back on the UNHRC. As recognised by the United Nations Association UK, during its participation in the UNHRC, the United States positively influenced effective steps towards reducing bias against Israel. Its departure may compromise this progress.
The array of threats and challenges makes international co-operation and multilateral action all the more essential. With an “America First” United States shunning the  long-held mantle of global leadership, with Britain potentially weakening ties with our European neighbours, and with the world feeling the growing pains of a shift towards a multipolar system, the UN represents a crucial platform for dialogue and co-ordination. Its agencies can create indispensable opportunities to manage change and to tackle the challenges of the world. I was pleased to hear my noble friend describe the work of many of the agencies as absolutely excellent.
Clearly, the UN can benefit from review and criticism. For the UN to continue to flourish, it is essential that criticisms are sought, considered and acted upon. I am delighted that the Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Coordination is already introducing a number of steps, promising management restructuring, the elimination of duplication, increased structural efficiency, greater transparency and, splendidly, an increase in the number of women in the UN Secretariat and its agencies. Over 50% of the senior management group and the 50 most senior individuals in the UN are now women for the first time in its history—a significant accomplishment.
I particularly applaud our first female ambassador to the UN, Dame Karen Pierce. She is a formidable diplomat, evidently thriving in her role. She uses the UK’s position as a permanent member of the Security Council and as a substantial financial contributor to push for collaboration in tackling the security, stability, development and prosperity challenges of today. I also applaud the Secretary-General’s proactive and explicit commitment to gender equality.
The horrific revelations of peacekeeper misconduct have already been mentioned. It is critical to abolish an intolerable culture of apparent impunity demonstrated by some UN operatives.
I am proud that the UK continues to be placed among the top financial contributors. It contributes more to multilateral institutions than any country other than the US, and our contributions are more than double those of the US in per capita terms. This is an unequivocal demonstration of our commitment to supporting the rules-based international order through which we work in concert with other countries to promote security and liberal values across the world. I have great confidence in our new Foreign Secretary, the right honourable Jeremy Hunt—my successor in my former constituency. I know that he sincerely and deeply holds to the values and importance of the UN and the rules-based international order.
We should take pride also that we were the first major economy to meet the UN’s 0.7% target on foreign aid and expenditure. Just this week, there was a welcome announcement from Alistair Burt, the Minister for the Middle East, in support of the UN Relief and Works Agency to help ensure that vulnerable Palestinians can access vital healthcare and education services. The additional aid will help keep schools open for 500,000 children and provide medical care for 3.5 million refugees.
The legitimacy of the UN is inextricably connected to its effectiveness in preserving peace and resolving conflicts. I fully support the Select Committee in urging the Government to discourage strongly the use of vetoes, especially when such behaviour hinders responsiveness to humanitarian crises. Of course, we have not used  the veto at the Security Council since the 1980s, but that is not the case for other members, and we have seen the veto used more commonly over the past 12 months than at any time since the First World War.
I conclude by echoing the noble Baroness’s comments about former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who died last month after an extraordinary life of dedication to building a fairer and more peaceful world. Around the turn of the century, Secretary-General Annan said that,
“if the United Nations does not attempt to chart a course for the world’s people in … the new millennium, who will?”